


Your Hand in Mine

by thorin_ohhhkenshield (thorinlock)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Comfort, Comforting Sherlock, Dead Mary, John is a Mess, Johnlock - Freeform, Johnlock Drabble, Johnlock Fluff, M/M, Post-Mary's Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-05
Updated: 2016-01-05
Packaged: 2018-05-11 22:16:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5643820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thorinlock/pseuds/thorin_ohhhkenshield
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John wants to know how Sherlock shuts emotions out - because frankly, even for John, they're getting tiring. </p><p>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzIK5FaC38w - the song that inspired the title, and a good Johnlock song to think about ;)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Your Hand in Mine

It has been some time since John lost Mary and the baby. He had anticipated what would happen with Mary - the confrontation, the emotional recoil after, the sheer exhaustion - but even then, she had after all still been his wife, properly, even for just a few short months. But he had not anticipated what would happen with the baby, and the mourning that followed after. 

He shouldn’t have had to be hit so hard, he thought. The baby wasn’t his, after all, and Mary... she did what she did. And yet, the period following the loss of his “wife” and “child” was unlike the period after he thought he lost Sherlock, or the period after the war when everything was just a cloudy haze of nothingness and misery. But why? Why should he have had to suffer the way he did? Why him?

 _Sentiment_ , he realised. That’s the problem. It’s like Sherlock always said: sad, little, thoughtful, emotional people feeling and feeling and letting it cloud their judgment and it was a _burden_ , it really was, and maybe Sherlock was on to something - maybe he was right the whole time. Sentiment brings you down.

He stood by the fire, listening to Sherlock to play the violin, and for the first time in the many years of their sharing this flat, interrupted him.

“How do you do it?” he asked.

The violin song halted. “Do what?” Sherlock turned to look at John, unassuming. 

“Be rid of sentiment. Be utterly focused on the logical - shut it all out.”

Sherlock looked surprised, and then his expression soon changed to befuddlement, and Sherlock was rarely befuddled.

“I just - I don’t know - sort the important from the unimportant. Why?”

"Because I need to," John said in a breath of resentment, looking away and shaking his head at the incredulity of it all - the many events of his past years and how they so often spiral and crash and burn him in his center and he should have known - he should have realised he just needed to sort them away. "I need to learn. To shut it out. There's just too much, too much sometimes. Because there is no comfort, is there? No comfort in - in this."

"In what?"

"In feeling."

Sherlock stood thoughtfully for a moment, staring at John with eyes that John was unfamiliar with - eyes that were soft with breathing that was slow and paced and posture that was gentle and John had to look away from this unfamiliarity, to search his memory for other moments Sherlock was this vulnerably comprehending to help corroborate the man he was used to and the man he was seeing now - but there were, weren't there? Moments. Sherlock did have his moments.

As if to prove a point, Sherlock set his violin aside, clasped his hands behind his back and slowly made his way towards John by the fireplace.

"You think not feeling comforts me," Sherlock said softly, still advancing towards John.

"Doesn't it? Maybe it'll comfort me too, for a change."

"It wouldn't," Sherlock said shortly, now standing next to John. "And it shouldn't. And it doesn't. Comfort me."

John was quite aware of their physical closeness now, a phenomenon with an emotional counterpart that had gotten progressively less rare ever since the Mary incident, ever since John moved back and Sherlock seemed to change, to grow in a way.

And yet John was still getting used to it, and it was more difficult now in fact, to get past the initial handling of this evolved relationship of theirs, as this time Sherlock's eyes seemed to be telling a new story, one John had perhaps seen fragments of in the past but not truly seen so vividly as he does now, a story that glowed in the tinges of gold and burned in the depths of black and flourished in the sea of green of Sherlock's eyes... what was it? A plea, it could be. A suggestion, perhaps. But possibly, there was also sadness, empathy, understanding, solace, but - and John felt presumptuous to interpret it as such, yet Sherlock had taught him over the years to be observant and as much as Sherlock might not admit it, John was quite the detective now - equally conceivable was the presence of desire. Yes, desire - desire to give. To give comfort, closeness, warmth. That, and a muted sense of awe, soft and thoughtful, perhaps set to the forlorn notes of a quiet violin - quite opposite from John's usual declarations of wonderment at Sherlock's genius, loud and firm, inversely set to a rousing clash of cymbals, but in many ways, the same.

John felt there was not quite enough space between them to breathe, and he began to take longer, slower breaths to accommodate the quiet now engulfing the expanse of nothing between them. How unnecessary such spaces of nothing seem now, and how necessarily the purposeful human mind feels the need to bridge such gaps. He cleared his throat - to clear his mind - and asked: "So what comforts you?"

"The truth, John?" Sherlock asked, barely breathing himself.

"Of course. Always with me, always the truth. You can tell me," John blundered.

"The truth is you think I'm a some sort of machine. That I thrive on 'alone', that I fancy isolation, that I prefer... nothing. And perhaps that was what I presented myself to be, but that really doesn't seem very comforting at all, even for my standards, does it?"

"I don't mean - I don't - you're not a machine."

"What makes you so sure?"

"I - I know you. I do know you, Sherlock. I..." John paused for a while, seeming to debate with himself what to say next. "No machine seeks comfort."

Sherlock smiled. "Quite right. Want to know my secret, then? What comforts me."

"Of course."

The two men were facing each other now, smiling - John in response to the sudden shine in Sherlock's radiant eyes, his warm smile, and Sherlock - because he felt like it.

"Tell me then, how do you seek comfort?" John asked breathlessly, reading ever so clearly the story he took so long to comprehend earlier. 

And Sherlock, still in his blue robe, house slippers, tousled hair, completely unprepared yet totally ready the way the unplanned can seem wholly destined, reached out and held John's hand, bringing it up to a point parallel to their eye levels, placing his other hand on John's shoulder.

His boyish smile growing wider still, he whispered,

"I dance."


End file.
